Natural Wolbachia infections for the control of Anopheles mosquitoes

 描述(申请人提供)：疟疾是通过感染疟原虫的雌性按蚊叮咬传播的。这种疾病每年导致近100万人死亡，其中大部分是非洲的孕妇和幼儿。2012年，有2亿人感染疟疾，33亿人面临感染风险。在……里面 在没有有效的疟疾疫苗的情况下，通过使用杀虫剂对蚊子媒介进行化学控制仍然是防治疟疾传播的最佳武器。然而，蚊子对杀虫剂的抗药性正在上升，迫切需要新的方法来控制蚊子的数量。作为疟疾控制的一种替代工具，沃尔巴克氏菌内共生菌的使用已被广泛提出，因为这些细菌感染能够在昆虫种群中迅速传播，并使宿主对包括疟疾在内的致病病原体的联合感染具有抵抗力。之前在按蚊物种中寻找这些细菌的努力没有成功，然而我们最近在西非布基纳法索几种按蚊的自然种群中发现了一种新的沃尔巴克氏菌株，我们称之为wanga。在这个项目中，我们将大大扩展我们对这种自然的沃尔巴克氏菌感染按蚊的知识，并将为未来旨在评估这些细菌用于疟疾控制的研究提供一个强大的工具包。我们将在细胞系中培养wAnga，并对细菌基因组进行测序。我们将产生稳定感染的蚊子株系，并将测试可能由沃尔巴克氏菌诱导的关键繁殖表型。此外，我们将开发一种快速和具体的方法，以便于在野外环境中检测受感染的蚊子，这将有助于研究野外蚊子种群中感染的流行和分布。这一极具创新性的建议将开辟一个新的研究领域，并为进一步发展基于内共生菌的按蚊病媒控制方法提供一个难得的机会。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Malaria is transmitted by the bite of the female Anopheles mosquitoes that are infected with Plasmodium parasites. This disease kills almost a million people each year, mostly pregnant women and young children in Africa. In 2012 there were 200 million people infected with malaria, and 3.3 billion people were at risk of infection. In the absence of an effective malaria vaccine, chemical control of the mosquito vector through the use of insecticides remains the best weapon to fight malaria transmission. Insecticide resistance in mosquitoes is however on the rise, and novel methods to control mosquito populations are urgently needed. As an alternative tool for malaria control, the use of Wolbachia endosymbionts has been widely proposed as these bacterial infections are able to spread rapidly through insect populations and render hosts resistant to co-infections with disease-causing pathogens, including Plasmodium. Previous efforts to find these bacteria in Anopheles species were unsuccessful, however we recently discovered a novel Wolbachia strain, which we called wAnga, in natural populations of several species of Anopheles mosquitoes in Burkina Faso, West Africa. In this project we will considerably expand our knowledge of this natural Wolbachia infection in Anopheles mosquitoes, and will generate a formidable toolkit for future studies aimed at assessing the use of these bacteria for malaria control. We will culture wAnga in cell lines and we will sequence the bacterial genome. We will generate stably infected mosquito lines and will test key reproductive phenotypes potentially induced by Wolbachia. Moreover, we will develop a rapid and specific method to facilitate detection of infected mosquitoes in field settings that will be instrumental to study the prevalence and distribution of infection in field mosquito populations. This highly innovative proposal will open up a new area of research and offers an exceptional opportunity to further endosymbiont-based vector control methods for Anopheles species.